I recently received a gift from a friend of mine. He knows how much I like to make AMVs and so he got me Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 (which "I" will refer to as APE3 for easy typing).

So here's the lowdown. I figure out how to use it, its user friendly like WMM (which is what I'd like to stop using) but its easier to use than AP6. I just finished remaking my "Cloud of Sadness" AMV but the problem is that the AVI file APE3 produces is too big (944MB) for me to share online (via my website or here at a-m-v.org). What's great about this, though, is that its the best video and audio quality I've ever seen and heard for any of my AMVs, and I couldn't have gotten the timing any better in WMM.

I've seen plenty of AMVs here at The Org and elsewhere that are no more than about 80MB but have excellent video quality. I've tried using a couple different codecs for the rendering of my AMVs through APE3 and the final results are about the same: crappy! Does anyone have any suggestions or solutions to my problem? I'd like to keep the video at 720x480 (or close to) and retain as much video quality as possible. My only other option is to export the timeline without audio into an uncompressed AVI file and then import that into WMM, add the audio, and then save as a WMV file. But I've tried that twice with varying aspects and received nearly the same results each time: WMM's low-qual video. I expected that, but still, I'd rather use APE3 since it allowed me to add scenes and overlapping scenes (through multiple clips) with its multiple timelines. Something WMM, of course, doesn't have.

I've asked for help from my roommate who is a web programmer/developer who knows quite about about computer stuff, including videos. I also contacted my friend who gave me APE3, since he knows a great deal more about AMVs and video editing than I do, but he couldn't help. I'm a little frustrated with all this, only because I wish to share such a nice amv with everyone else (since its a great improvement on all my videos in the last two years). If anyone can help me at all that would be awesome. So that's why I made this post, and I've also contacted a couple other editors directly who have shared their AMVs at The Org.

Having the big, high-quality export from Premiere is a good thing, but what you have to remember is that <b>the file you export from Premiere is not the file you distribute online</b>.

To compress the one into the other, you'll want to use a separate program such as VirtualDub[/Mod]. EADFAG goes through the compression process step by step, starting <a href="http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/avtech/avspostintro.html">here</a>.

Codec support for APE is still, unfortunately, very bad. In the prior versions, I couldn't even get Lagarith to work right. Now, Lagarith seems to work but now has indexing issues -- I feel this is the same with other workable codecs.

The only method of APE output that is completely reliable is MPEG-2 (other than Windows Media). Not only will you have the best flexibility in tweaking options, but the output is also nice. You can use the MPEG-2 file (with DGIndex) to use VirtualDubMod to convert to XviD -- which should give you both options for post-processing the footage and the <100 MB output file you require for posting.

Let me know if you have any other questions on APE. I'll give you any help you need.

GloryQuestor wrote:I also use APE3, and have been using APE since the first one.

Codec support for APE is still, unfortunately, very bad. In the prior versions, I couldn't even get Lagarith to work right. Now, Lagarith seems to work but now has indexing issues -- I feel this is the same with other workable codecs. Now that the latest version has update support, I'm hoping that the third-party codec support will be improved.

The only method of APE output that is completely reliable is MPEG-2 (other than Windows Media). Not only will you have the best flexibility in tweaking options, but the output is also nice. You can use the MPEG-2 file (with DGIndex) to use VirtualDubMod to convert to XviD -- which should give you both options for post-processing the footage and the <100 MB output file you require for posting.

Let me know if you have any other questions on APE. I'll give you any help you need.

Scintilla wrote:...To compress the one into the other, you'll want to use a separate program such as VirtualDub[/Mod]. EADFAG goes through the compression process step by step, starting <a href="http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/avtech/avspostintro.html">here</a>.

Either I didn't follow the instructions properly, or I should start all over. I have no intentions of doing the latter. I spent a decent amount of time ripping and removing interlace during the re-encoding process that produced GB sized AVI files. I tried following the step-by-step process for compressing my AMV but it didn't work the way I had hoped. I ended up with an AVI file AMV over 100MB in size with worse than WMM quality.

GloryQuestor wrote:The only method of APE output that is completely reliable is MPEG-2 (other than Windows Media). Not only will you have the best flexibility in tweaking options, but the output is also nice. You can use the MPEG-2 file (with DGIndex) to use VirtualDubMod to convert to XviD -- which should give you both options for post-processing the footage and the <100 MB output file you require for posting.

Let me know if you have any other questions on APE. I'll give you any help you need. :D

I'll give your method a shot, GQ. In fact, I'm trying it out right now to see if I can produce the file I'm looking for. If I need more help I'll definitely ask. Thanks for the offer.

Anime_AJ wrote:I'd like to keep the video at 720x480 (or close to) and retain as much video quality as possible.

If you are making an XviD AVI to distribute for display on computer screens, 720x480 is the wrong resolution to use. In fact, unless the video file is flagged correctly (which for the AVI file format is almost never recognized properly) OR it is for DVD/TV use (in which case you wouldn't need to compress to XviD), you should very rarely use 720x480.

For 16:9 aspect ratio sources (some newer TV shows and all newer movies) either 848x480, 768x432, 720x400 or 640x352 are the recommended resolutions.

As for the file size ending up over 100MB, did you remember to compress your audio to MP3 at the same time as the video (Lame ACM) or later in a separate step? This will shave about 30 to 40MB of filesize off the final product, depending on the length of the audio.

Also, if your video is resized to 640x480 instead of 720x480 (assuming it is 4:3 aspect ratio material), there are less pixels to compress, making the file size smaller while ensuring proper video playback dimensions.

Thank you, Willen. Your post finally helped me achieve the results I was looking for. Thank you so very much!

And thank you to GloryQuestor for providing the initial information that Willen later added to. Thank you for your support!

And to Scintilla, too. You were the first to respond to this topic and I appreciate your help. I'll be sure to visit the guide you linked, I'm positive it'll come in handy in the future. Thank you!

^_^ Well, "Cloud of Sadness (v.2)" was recompressed with Xvid using VirtualDub to 130MB from 944MB. I made two .avi files that were just under 100MB, but the audio didn't time correctly with the video after VDub finished processing. I'm happy with the results, though, and will be uploading the video to my site. Check it out!